AAVC: CubeSat Control Bundle

The CubeSat Attitude Control System is a 3-axis control system using reaction wheels for attitude control and magnetic torquers for momentum unloading. A star camera and MEMS Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is used for attitude determination. The control system can maneuver the CubeSat to any orientation. The magnetic torquers can also be used as a backup attitude control system if the reaction wheels are not operational.

The Attitude Control System uses an Unscented Kalman Filter (sometimes known as a sigma-point filter) for attitude determination. It can incorporate star camera measurements, magnetometer measurements and sun magnitude measurements from the solar panels. This makes it very robust.

The following figure shows both ground track and orbit views of a 3U CubeSat space weather satellite in orbit. With VisualCommander you can choose from a wide variety of graphics tools such as these to drag and drop onto the interface pages.

Bundle Contents

• Attitude determination and control and momentum management modules
• GPS interface module
• Command list reader module
• Re-configurable graphical user interface pre-loaded with spacecraft trajectory and navigation views
• Simulation setup file of a CubeSat mission

The following movie shows a reorientation maneuver using reaction wheels. The CubeSat is in a polar orbit. Several of the pages in the CubeSat display are shown during the movie. This CubeSat has eight body mounted high-efficiency solar panels and the power output is shown on the power page. It has three orthogonal reaction wheels and single skew wheel. All four are used during the maneuver.